News

iPhone, iPod touch owners report battery drain with iOS 4.3

By Charles Starrett ● Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Some iPhone 3GS/4 and iPod touch 4G owners are complaining of severe battery drain under iOS 4.3. Multiple Apple Support Discussion threads (one, two, three, four) have been dedicated to the subject, with most users reporting that turning off push services, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Location Services does not help the problem. One thread in particular tells of users whose iPhones have not auto-locked, and sat idle with the screen on for minutes or hours at a time. Notably, several iLounge editors have also noticed severe battery drain, although the problem is not present on all our phones. The problem appears to affect both iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 units, as well as the iPod touch 4G, and several users have reported that they were able to eradicate the issue by performing a restore and re-populating the phone manually file by file instead of from a backup.

Comments

1

This is absolutely a problem with my wife’s 3GS. I even replaced the battery with a brand new one from iFixIt.com to only get the same amount of time from a full charge. It’s ridiculous. Something like 2-3 hours in standby. My wife barely uses her iPhone. She only has it because I upgraded to the iPhone 4. This really needs to be fixed.

Posted by Bob on March 15, 2011 at 10:19 AM (CDT)

1

I’ve read that turning off ping helps in restrictions

Posted by Rob Sammons on March 15, 2011 at 10:33 AM (CDT)

1

I thought that my latitude service was causing that. I turned it off and it seems to work better. I notice that my new iPad2’s battery goes quickly lower and takes longer to charge.

Posted by dennis on March 15, 2011 at 10:44 AM (CDT)

1

I have not had this problem on my iPhone 4, but I always do a full restore and put apps, music, etc back on manually rather than restore from backup.

Posted by Jason Engel on March 15, 2011 at 11:35 AM (CDT)

1

This has been a problem for the ipod touch for over a year now, since IOS 4.00 Nice to finally have the tech media on board!

If you search Apples forums for Ipod touch Battery life you will find over 150,000 page views and about 75 pages on this topic alone.

Posted by Mike Morgan on March 15, 2011 at 11:43 AM (CDT)

1

Some apps are running in the background. You just have to figure out which ones are the offending ones and be aware of them. I know “fring” is an example. If you go to settings->general->Usage: usage time should be less than the standby time when you are not using the phone. If not, some apps are running in the background.

Posted by Min on March 15, 2011 at 12:01 PM (CDT)

1

i have noticed this as well with my iPhone 4.

I have had my phone on charge all night, made around 10 minutes of calls this morning and apart from that it has sat idle in my bag. I am now down to 58% which is much lower than i remember.

Posted by Mark Cody on March 15, 2011 at 12:15 PM (CDT)

1

I haven’t noticed any difference in battery life. I use my phone average of 12 or 14 hrs a day.

Posted by langdon on March 15, 2011 at 12:34 PM (CDT)

1

I haven’t seen this battery problem on my iPhone 4 or my wife’s 3GS, but has anyone had issues with incoming calls?
Since we upgraded to 4.3, we have both had several incoming calls where there was no sound from the caller, even though the call was connected. After hanging up, the next call would come through just fine. It seems odd that it is happening to both phones and only after the upgrade.

Posted by ChrisP on March 15, 2011 at 12:39 PM (CDT)

1

Completely wrecked my battery life. I haven’t used my phone AT ALL today. Took it out of the dock at 8am. Looked at it about a dozen times to check calendar. Did NOTHING ELSE. Now (6:30pm) it is at 26%. Useless. Very cross.

Posted by collapsibletank on March 15, 2011 at 2:30 PM (CDT)

1

What…Apple made a mistake? That’s impossible, only those “other” companies have battery problems…and antenna problems…and total software control problems (wait, that one’s all Apple).

Posted by Earldom on March 15, 2011 at 3:06 PM (CDT)

1

Glad to hear it’s related to the OS update, at least there’s a possibility of it being fixed. I just replaced a deactivated iPhone 3G this weekend with an iPod touch 4g and was very disappointed to find the battery life is no better than what I’ve been getting from the old iPhone.

Posted by Paul on March 15, 2011 at 9:03 PM (CDT)

1

I’ve noticed a real difference in battery drain since upgrading to 4.3. Today my phone went from 100% to 90% in about two hours without me using it at all.

Posted by Darald on March 15, 2011 at 10:10 PM (CDT)

1

Experienced the same problem. Fixed it by leaving my battery at full charge (connected to AC) and then powering off and syncing once. Perfectly fine after that. (I got the same issue in iOS 4.2. Same method to fix)

Posted by Casper Soong on March 16, 2011 at 1:28 AM (CDT)

1

My clock on my iPhone 4 did not move ahead one hour with daylight savings time. Will Apple fix that?

Posted by Renate Schuch on March 16, 2011 at 8:54 AM (CDT)

1

iPad (1) 32GB wifi is the same, maybe better.
iPhone 4 is the same, possibly a little less.
Very hard to tell. Every update since the first iPod touch has people with claims on both sides.
Often, if you see drastic battery change, a reset will alleviate this.
With these updates though, I see no big changes.

Posted by sb on March 16, 2011 at 12:44 PM (CDT)

1

iPad 2 battery goes from 100% to 70% in 2 hours of use (reading email, nook at low brightness). Seems like much faster drain than my iPad 1.

Posted by drakebullet on March 16, 2011 at 1:00 PM (CDT)

1

I have seen a pretty noticeable difference in battery drain on my iPhone 4 since the update. Before, I would get through an entire work day and have 1/2 to 3/4 battery life left with some light web browsing and app usage. After, I am seeing less than 1/2 remaining at 1:00 pm with the same amount of use.

I will see if killing all open apps completely changes this. I generally only kill the apps around 3:00 or 4:00 pm. and at bedtime.

Posted by Mitch on March 16, 2011 at 1:43 PM (CDT)

1

HOLY CRAP! I read about this issue here just this morning, but hadn’t noticed any issues on my month-old iPhone 4. Today, my phone went from 100% to 91% in an hour of standby with no apps running in the background (and got really hot to boot), then just dropped 10% more on a mere 14 minute phone call! Time to go complain to Apple Support…

Posted by Matthew Gerber on March 16, 2011 at 3:01 PM (CDT)

1

I have seen a staggering difference in my ipad’s battery life, usually I could run it all day on full-brightness or 2 days on lowest brightness. It’s only 6 and my iPad has been on lowest brightness the entire day and it’s down to 25% keep in mind I use it much more at night than during the day…